The title of this book is somewhat misleading. Photo retouching and AdobeR PhotoshopR is not a new idea. Photoshop has been the industry standard for photo editing for years. However, what I liked the most about this book is that it was about more than the basic photo retouching covered in most books on Photoshop.

That being said, Eric Mahe discusses his approach for turning a photo into an artistic statement as opposed to just retouching the original photo. First, he reworks the too-white sky by replacing it with a sky from a second photo. He then isolates and enhances the subject of the photo, a little girl's face, using the Photoshop Calculations command.

Gerard Niemetzky worked on restoring a 100 year old photo. In his workshop, he discusses the scanning technique he uses to maintain the embossed aspect of a photo within a frame when converting it to a digital image. He also discusses the sequence of steps and adjustment layers he uses to make this very faded photo look almost like new.

Starting from a photo of an old church and graveyard, Thibaut Granier worked on a matte painting destined to be a backdrop for a movie scene. To achieve a haunted, eerie effect, he first replaced and then subdued the sky in the photo. Next he used a montage approach to build up the graveyard with individual grave markers. Each marker was added one at a time to the foreground of the picture and then manipulated to blend into the atmosphere of the photo.

As with all books in the O'ReillyR Designer's Notebook series, each professional artist shares his or her expertise and artistic approach in a step-by-step workshop with accompanying full color examples that show the progressive steps to the final result.

The nine French artists featured in this book are Gerard Niemetzky, Dominique Legrand and Antony Legrand, Eric Mahe, Vincent Risacher, Francois Quinio, Thibaut Granier, Poisson Rouge and Cyril Bruneau. The book was originally published in French and was translated by Marie-Laure Clech from the original entitled Retouches Photo avec Photoshop - Les cahiers des Designers 05.